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LONG BLOG

This morning I realised something about Infinite that I think is actually a pretty big flaw, especially compared to the previous games of the series.

I was listening to the Gamestation podcast yesterday and they were talking about Infinite, and there was mention of how the gun variation in the game isn't very good. So I thought about it myself, and they're totally right. You have various generic machine guns and rifles, a couple of standard handguns, and an RPG launcher. The only gun that's slightly out of the ordinary is the heater, which I personally find unwieldy to use anyway. It's miles away from the stuff in previous games. Things like the chemical thrower from the original and the various different Big Daddy weapons in the second for example. Not only that, but you have the special ammo types as well. They don't just do damage differently to each other, but they behave differently as well. You have the electrocuting and exploding buck for the shotgun, the electric and freezing gel with the chemical thrower, the homing rockets and proximity mines for the rocket launcher, etc, etc. But in Infinite all the guns pretty much just do the same thing. Just shoot normal bullets or exploding things. Not very interesting.

Then there are some things I noticed myself. The movement speed being slower in Infinite really changes how the game plays, and not for the better. While in the original games firefights felt really frantic, fast, and kinetic. You felt like you had a lot of mobility and a good ability to dodge incoming fire. Fights could move a whole lot too. Where you started firing at an enemy could very often be somewhere completely different to where you finally put them down. In Infinite you don't have that at all. You feel weighed down and like you can't really avoid incoming fire. And the lack of movement in the battles make the fights feel much more like shooting galleries. You often only stay in one place, and you can't really move much even if you wanted to because if you come out of cover you'll get shot down without being able to return fire if you're sprinting. While fighting from the skylines has you moving faster, it's impractical. The speed you move and the wonkiness of the controls means you can't really get your aiming right, so it's a waste of time to even try. In the older games, although the aiming was still a bit janky, shooting while moving wasn't really a problem since you were the one controlling the direction, so you could predict and compensate for it. Or at least, that's how it is on consoles. Maybe it isn't a problem with mouse controls.

The limitation of how many weapons you can carry is a problem too. It's not as big of a problem as the stuff I've already mentioned, but it adds yet more to the feeling of constriction in combat. In the previous games you could experiment much more, and gameplay felt more varied in being able to choose whatever crazy weapon you had at any time. I really can't see any reason why they took that away. It doesn't make any sense at all. It means I'm just falling back on the same few weapons, not that using the others really makes much difference anyway.

And continuing on the topic of varied gameplay, the lack of different mini-games is sorely missed too. Hacking and taking photos may not have been the best aspects of the older games, but totally taking them out without replacing them with anything was a bad move. The already stationary and generic gunfights can really start to drag on when there's nothing else between them apart from conversation. The story and characters are great, but it feels like whenever I'm not doing that, I'm either scouring environments for supplies and such, but being slowed down by the reduced run speed, or I have gunfights which are completely unspectacular. Even the Handyman and Motorized Patriot don't really do much to change things up. Although I have to say I really like the design of the latter of those two examples. The way he spouts out nationalistic rhetoric while raining down gunfire on you is a pretty interesting thing to behold, and I really like the way that when he steps he makes bell noises. But it's little compared to all the different splicers, Big Daddies, and robotic enemies from the older games.

But all this doesn't mean that the gameplay is bad. It's simply okay. Mediocre. It's pretty disappointing considering how much better it could have been. The previous games showed that was possible, even without the tightest controls. Also I'm noticing what all these problems have in common. They've all resulted from the game becoming more generic. It's more homogenised, and the changes are quite obviously from the biggest shooters around. But they've done nothing but constrict the game. It's really weird to see a Bioshock game fall foul of this mistake. It's so depressing. Maybe it's because of pressure from the publisher to appeal to a wider audience. That was, after all, the reason behind the dreadfully boring box art. Maybe they thought they had to dumb the game down to have wider appeal. If so, then you have really disappointed me Ken Levine. You're supposed to be an auteur, not a bitch to the publisher.

So this leads me to something else that was discussed on the aforementioned podcast. They said that the game didn't really deserve the review scores it got. While I tend to hold the position that nothing, or almost nothing, should ever get a 10/10 (nothing is perfect), I was kind of resistant to the idea that the game was overrated. But upon pondering this, I think it actually was. No matter how great a game does story and characters, and no matter how wonderful the setting is, when you have this many problems with the gameplay, there is no way that the game could be worth plenty of the scores it was given. Gameplay is king, and, as they saying goes, boring is worse than bad. Not that it was bad in the older games, but it was definitely a whole lot more interesting. Another thing that they brought up is that perhaps it got such great scores because reviewers were in a rush to write up their review, so they did it right after finishing the game. Thus they were doing so when the ending of the game was still fresh in their minds, and they were too excited over that to really take their time on giving a fair and holistic critique. I haven't finished the game, so I don't know if that's the case, but I think it reasonably could be.

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About Scrustleone of us since 2:06 PM on 04.27.2012

Hello all, I'm Scrustle. I've had a strong love for games for most of my life. The original Pokemon games and Zelda: Majora's Mask are what first got me in to gaming, but I didn't branch out much beyond that until the generation after.

Favourite genres are action adventure games in the vein of Zelda, racing games, RPGs, and action games like DMC etc., but I enjoy plenty of other genres from time to time as well.